Mr. Speaker, I can assure members that my presentation will not be as loud or as exuberant as the previous one. That may be a very welcome reprieve for the members and many others watching TV this evening. I also want to say that I am going to be splitting my time with the NDP member for Beloeil—Chambly. I am going to do that for them.
It is my pleasure to speak to the budget implementation act today. I can best describe this budget implementation act and the budget as a distraction from Liberal scandals and failures. I want to set the stage a bit before we talk more about that.
Back in 1975, when I began my work career, I was a 15-year-old boy. I got a job working at Steinbach Toyota, and my job was to wash cars. I worked for a gentleman by the name of Henry Kliewer. He taught me how to wash cars. He developed in me an appreciation for clean vehicles and he taught me all about detailing. He was a fussy guy and he was absolutely careful and particular about everything he did.
We were walking through his shop one day in the back of the dealership. We were coming up to the showroom part of the building when I noticed a penny on the ground. I was going to give it a bit of a kick with my foot. He saw what I was going to do and he picked it up and said, “This is one penny I am never going to have to work for.” He said, “I want to tell you something. I look after the nickels and the dimes, and the dollars look after themselves.” I have never forgotten that. That was in 1975 when I was making $1.95 an hour and he was concerned about nickels and dimes.
I can extrapolate that to today. What a privilege it is to stand in this House and talk about the finances of the country of Canada. It is an extreme privilege, and it is humbling, but today requires us to look at the millions of dollars because what we are talking about is the billions. If we are good stewards of the millions of dollars that we are entrusted with as members of Parliament, then the billions will probably look after themselves.
Let us talk about some of these millions of dollars that we have not been looking after very carefully.
The current Liberal government under this Prime Minister has given Canadian taxpayer dollars to the Clinton Foundation. It has given money to Hamas. It has gotten India to invest $250 million here in Canada, but only after we have turned around and invested $750 million in India. If we do the math, that does not quite add up.
We have had a crisis with illegal migrants at our southern border with the United States. That crisis cost us roughly $200 million in 2017 and $400 million in 2018. In 2019, it was another $600 million. It has cost us $1.1 billion already because we have mismanaged our borders and allowed illegal migrants to come into this country, and we have been footing the bill. In addition to that, municipalities and provinces have also had to pick up additional expenses. That number is again projected to grow to another almost $2 billion this coming year.
Let us then look at the Trans Mountain expansion pipeline. Kinder Morgan owned the Trans Mountain pipeline. It had it on the books for $600 million. It invested another $1.2 billion on working toward constructing a second pipeline, known as the Trans Mountain expansion. The current government turned around and bought the existing pipeline plus the investment that had been made in the proposed pipeline for $4.5 billion, using Canadian taxpayer dollars.
Kinder Morgan had $1.8 billion invested in that project. The Liberal government turned around and gave it $4.5 billion for its $1.8 billion. Kinder Morgan had to realize a capital gain of $2.7 billion. That was Canadian taxpayer dollars that left this country, left our resource sector here in Canada and were sent down to wealthy Texas investors in Kinder Morgan, which owned the Trans Mountain pipeline.
We have not been managing our millions of dollars very well. We have given $2.7 billion of Canadian taxpayer money to American investors. In addition to that, Canada could have received a further investment from Kinder Morgan of close to $10 billion in the actual construction of the Trans Mountain expansion. That money will also now have to come from Canadian taxpayers.
We have not been managing our millions of dollars very well under the Liberal government and under the current Prime Minister. It has been a failure, and Canadian taxpayers are going to be the ones left on the hook.
We have paid convicted terrorists $10.5 million. We have paid millions of dollars to Bombardier in Quebec. We have bought rusted-out CF-18s from Australia to bolster up our defence forces and our defence fleet of aircraft. That is money we will not recover.
Now we are looking at a budget implementation act that would implement the budget that the government has presented to the House, which is not balanced. The Liberals are projecting a $20-billion shortfall again.
I worked in the credit union system for 30 years. For 17 of those years, I was the president and chairman of Manitoba's largest credit union. One thing I know is that when times are good, money is set aside because rainy days are coming.
We were promised sunny days. The sunny days are gone. I think they left on the first day after the election. We have some rainy days on the horizon. The time to invest money and to set money aside was when the sun was shining. I saw that over and over again in my experience and involvement in the credit union system. People who wisely put money aside when times were good were the people who were successful with their finances at the end of the day.
Members of the Liberal caucus stand up in this place and tout the good results they are having from a financial perspective in the Canadian economy. They tell us about all the jobs they have created and how the economy is booming. It is actually not booming as much as they say it is. They tell us it is booming, and yet they have not been salting away money and reducing our debt to build up our inventory of cash so that we can weather the storms that may someday come.
The time to do that is when times are good, and the Liberals would like Canadians to believe that times are good. If times are good, why do we still have a deficit budget? We need to have a balanced budget. The Prime Minister promised in 2015 that by 2019 we would have a balanced budget. We do not have a balanced budget.
The budget that has been presented this year was supposed to be an election-type budget, with lots of good news. There is $41 billion of new spending in this budget over the next five years. It was meant to be a bit of a hit budget, a budget that people could get excited about. With all the scandals and failures of the current government, it hardly got any airplay when it was announced. The $41 billion of additional spending in the next five years is not enough to distract the Canadian taxpayer from the failures and scandals of the current government.